No Choice but Guilty Lackawanna Case Highlights Legal Tilt (Washington Post)

LACKAWANNA, N.Y. -- Even now, after the arrests and the anger and the world media spotlight, the mystery for neighbors in this old steel town remains this: Why would six of their young men so readily agree to plead guilty to terror charges, accepting long prison terms far from home?

"These knuckleheads betrayed our trust, and we're disgusted with their attendance at the camps in Afghanistan," Mohammed Albanna, 52, a leader in the Yemeni community here, said of the six men who have admitted to attending an al Qaeda training camp two years ago. "But the punishment doesn't fit the crime, or the government's rhetoric. It's ridiculous."

But defense attorneys say the answer is straightforward: The federal government implicitly threatened to toss the defendants into a secret military prison without trial, where they could languish indefinitely without access to courts or lawyers.

That prospect terrified the men. They accepted prison terms of 6 1/2 to 9 years.

"We had to worry about the defendants being whisked out of the courtroom and declared enemy combatants if the case started going well for us," said attorney Patrick J. Brown, who defended one of the accused. "So we just ran up the white flag and folded. Most of us wish we'd never been associated with this case."

Yudel's Line: Given the possibility of a secret execution, what 9-year felony wouldn't you confess to?

    

Hello Martyr, Hello Fatah: Police close down Israeli Arab 'right of return' summer camp (Ha'aretz)

"We will continue the struggle until victory is achieved, until the liberation of Palestine. There is nothing better than being a 'Shahid' [martyr] for the homeland."

    

Interesting: BackYardJungle.org

"Backyard jungle is a sophisticated, free, kid-friendly website where users around the world can load photos, drawings, and descriptions about the natural surroundings where they live, their "backyard."

"Users manage and map their own information, share it with other people who visit the website, and visit and comment on the backyards of other users as well.

"With other people worldwide users can explore and answer the question, "What's out there?" All the content (information, photos, and drawings) on the website is loaded by users themselves."